The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 11: Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

New Ways of Reading 

by Nancy Jane Moore

 

In mid-December 2024, I embarked on a reading practice unlike any I have ever done before: reading for about 15-30 minutes every day, usually in the morning, and making notes or writing down quotations from what I read. The motivation for the practice was to give myself a period of sitting quietly after doing exercises before checking my blood pressure, but it soon became something I loved on its own, a new way of reading.

 Certain kinds of books lend themselves to this sort of practice. I began with Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, which is a great example of the perfect book: beautifully written (and/or translated, since Rovelli writes in Italian), philosophical, and complex. You really don’t want to read more than a few pages, or at most a chapter, because there’s so much to think about in the book.

 Most novels do not lend themselves to this kind of reading practice. If you get really engaged with a story, you don’t want to stop reading. Rather you need books that make you want to stop and digest what you just read instead of ones where you have to know what happens next.

 I went to a program in the fall where Jenny Odell was interviewing Cory Doctorow and got to talking to the people sitting next to me before the presentation. They had never heard of Jenny, so I waxxed enthusiastic about her most recent book, Saving Time, and explained that it was the perfect book to read for a short period every day. One of them observed that it was “a very specific recommendation.”

 And it is, because I have tried reading some of the books that were best for this practice the same way I read a novel, and it didn’t work well. They are not meant to be read straight through at one sitting.

 Poetry is well-suited for this practice. One of the books I read was Jean Le Blanc’s Field Guide to the Spirits, an Aqueduct Conversation Piece. I’m sure I’d looked through it before, but reading poetry is so different from reading fiction. Read several poems – maybe read each one several times or even out loud – and then stop.

 Rebecca Solnit’s books are also perfect for daily reading. I read both her recent essay collection No Straight Road Takes You There and her older Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

I did read some more reportorial non-fiction as part of this practice, including Ed Yong’s wonderful book on the way animals (including humans) sense the world, An Immense World, but in general I tended toward books that I would define as philosophical – not as works of official philosophy, mind you, which as I learned from reading Solnit are more about arguing with other philosophers – but philosophical writing, the sort of books that both Solnit and Odell write.

 The other reading activity I did this year that was different from my usual pattern was to read for the 100 notable small press books list that was recently published on Lit Hub.  [https://lithub.com/100-notable-small-press-books-of-2025/] I was reading science fiction and fantasy for this list, which included many genres, and was allowed to recommend three books for the final list.

 My choices were Nisi Shawl’s Making Amends, Theodora Goss’s Letters From an Imaginary Country, and Margaret Killjoy’s The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. I read many other good books as well; it was hard to narrow it down to three. You can find my capsule reviews on the Lit Hub page.

 It interested me to discover that my favorite books were collections (though Nisi’s is a collection of connected stories that make a novel on its own). I haven’t been reading as much short fiction in recent years and I think I had forgotten how vital it is to the science fiction and fantasy genres.

 I wanted to participate in this list because I normally read a number of small press books and, like Miriam Gershow, who organized the project, feel like they’re all too often overlooked in “best of” lists. I don’t think I’ll do it again, in part because I’d rather read a little more randomly. They are seeking readers for next year, however, and I recommend the practice. 

 One of my very favorite books of the past year was Pat Murphy’s The Adventures of Mary Darling, which does a fabulous job of challenging and reimagining Peter Pan and raising interesting questions about Sherlock Holmes as well. Since this was published by Tachyon Publications, it qualified for the 100 small press list, but given that I am in a writing group with Pat and even rated a mention in the acknowledgements section of the book, I could not honorably consider it.

 However, one of the joys of this report for Aqueduct is that I can freely recommend books by friends and fellow writers from workshops without a shred of guilt, which brings me to another one, or, in fact, a series: Madeleine Robins’s Sarah Tolerance books. She reissued the first three books this year along with a fourth: The Doxies Penalty.

Many people know that I am fond of swordswomen, so it is perhaps not a surprise that I would take to the adventures of a young woman with a sword in Regency England. But I recommend these books even if you care nothing for a good swordfight or the era. Madeleine has tweaked the Regency period just enough to make these alternate history, and they are also good mysteries with compelling characters and complex stories.

 They also make excellent comfort reading in our exceedingly complicated times. Start with the first one, Point of Honour.

 I read a great deal of nonfiction at all times. My favorite this year was Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, which completely destroys the silly dreams of the broligarch crowd. Becker is an astrophysicist and a science writer, and takes apart such absurd notions as living on Mars and the singularity, not to mention so-called AI, in devastating ways. 

 Becker himself reads science fiction, but, unlike the people he is writing about, he comprehends that the genre is not intended to inspire people to invent the torment nexus or develop a dystopia. If you regularly run into people who rave about AI and the broligarch future, this is the book for you.

 Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer is another important book, especially if one lesson you learned from the pandemic was that good indoor air quality can keep us from constantly sharing respiratory viruses. Zimmer dug into the history of studying the air we breathe in schools and crowded spaces, and provides clear detail of what needs to be done.

 As someone who carries around a CO2 meter – the level of CO2 in a room gives you a good indication of whether you are likely to breathe the lung exhalations of others – and wears a mask when that level starts climbing to about 800, I greatly appreciated Zimmer’s careful analysis of what should be – and can be – done.

 I grew up reading a daily newspaper and have always loved magazines. Although I still pick up the occasional print newspaper (and read others online) and subscribe to New Scientist (which piles up around here way too fast), I have ended up with subscriptions to various kinds of online publications these days, including both individual newsletters and nonprofit or collectively owned publications.

 Two of the publications I subscribe to are national, even international at times: ContrabandCamp, which covers Black issues, and The Flytrap, which is feminist. Otherwise, I’ve just started reading two new publications in my area: Coyote and Oakland Review of Books. And I keep up with local news from Oaklandside.

 My most indispensible newsletters are those from Rebecca Solnit, who is capable of being positive about the current chaos without being foolish, and Dave Karpf, who reads some very bad books by tech broligarchs and skewers them beautifully. I couldn’t read those books, but it’s important to know what those people think and why they’re wrong.

 It is possible that I am getting a skewed view of the world, for which I am very thankful.

 

 Nancy Jane Moore is the author of three Aqueduct books – Changeling, The Weave, and For the Good of the Realm – along with a lot of short stories and a small but growing quantity of poems. She is currently working on the sequel to For the Good of the Realm, which is finally shaking out. She blogs weekly at the Treehouse Writers blog. [https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/] Lately she has been contributing to the work of Unbreaking [https://unbreaking.org/] by digging into relevant litigation. Otherwise she can be found walking around her Oakland, California, neighborhood in the company of many local crows.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 18: Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

Past, Present, and Future

by Nancy Jane Moore

 

The three books most on my mind from this year’s reading represent the past, present, and future, but despite the echoes of A Christmas Carol, these aren’t Scrooge’s ghosts but rather ones that haunt, or should haunt, all of us living in the United States.

 One of them is historical fiction and does what genre does best in great hands: tells the deeper truth of the past, the part that was papered over and ignored by most of us.

 Another is nonfiction, natural history that lays bare the ways the developer mindset has caused us to lose our core connection to nature, even as the almost-wild world still exists in the pockets of our abandoned industrial parks and other odd locales.

 And the third is science fiction mixed with a little magic, and provides guideposts for the future, guideposts we’re in dire need of at the moment as the polycrises come crashing down.

 Past, present, and future, all of which we need to consider deeply right now.

 Representing the Past is James, by Percival Everett. This incredible re-envisioning of the iconic book Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of James, the enslaved Black man who escapes with Huck, has not been overlooked – it won the National Book Award. But until his earlier novel Erasure was made into a movie (American Fiction), Everett was not so widely known.

 I stumbled across some of Everett’s short stories more than twenty years ago and was blown away, but even though I knew about him, I had no idea how many books he’d actually written until the last few years when I discovered several of his novels at the wonderful East Bay Booksellers in Oakland.

 In James, Everett gives us the whole being of a man working both to be true to himself and to survive, a strong contrast to the stereotypical caricature in Twain’s novel. It should be absurd today that we still need to be shown that enslaved persons were, in fact, human beings and that they took actions large and small to claim that humanity and find pockets of freedom, but the sad truth is that the ugly lies persist despite the intervening years since the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The truth of James is, of course, well known to most African Americans. This book sets it out boldly at the point where the compromise at the heart of the American experiment exploded.

It is the custom in the United States to gloss over the past. That custom has kept us from ever facing the damage done in our names or changing our relationship to our history or each other.

 We need both history and historical fiction that tells the truth. In fact, we need all the truth-telling that is made clearest in fiction. Much of Percival Everett’s other work is surrealistic, though no less truthful at its core; The Trees – which deals with lynching and which I recommended here a couple of years ago – is even more haunting than James.

 It occurs to me that I’m making it sound like one should read the book out of duty, which is misleading. This book is funny in places, dark in others, and goes to unexpected places. It’s always a joy to read Everett.

 In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Christopher Brown – also known for his dystopic science fiction – shows us both the nature all around us, even in the post-industrial city, and also what we’re doing to it and to ourselves. Most of this book is set in Austin, Texas, where he lives and where he and his wife built a house on property once home to pipelines and related uses.

 I have subscribed to Brown’s Field Notes newsletter, from which he developed this book, for several years and found it powerful, a must-read in my email inbox every week, so the book was high on my to-read list when it came out.

 I’ve lived in Austin twice in my life, for a total of 17 years. Last spring I traveled there to see the eclipse and was horrified by the ways too much money is transforming it, even as I had thought money had already done so much damage when I left in 2014. So I have some feeling for what Brown is writing about, though I do not know the area with the intimacy that he brings to his explorations.

 And that intimacy is a large part of what makes this book worth a slow read. You can follow him as he climbs under barbed wire fences, gets muddy in wetlands, meets the creatures and occasional person who live in almost – but not quite – abandoned spaces, spaces that are vulnerable to the unrelenting development that describes not just Austin, but many parts of our country.

 Development plays a large part here. A few paragraphs on the founding of Austin out of Texas history notes that Stephen F. Austin – known to all Texas schoolchildren as the father of Texas since he led the first Anglo settlers (the old 300) into the state in 1823 – “took tremendous joy in the sound of trees coming down to build towns.” Under 300-year-old live oaks – few of which are left due to Austin and the others – Anglo settlers divvied up the cleared land.

If you pay attention to climate-change issues, this book will not assuage your fears. But it will give you new depth and understanding on what the true questions are.

 It is in Andrea Hairston’s future set out in Archangels of Funk that I find hope. Recently I was at the annual meeting/holiday party for the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, an organization I have been involved with since it began in 2018, a group with a vision of taking property – not just housing – off the speculative market and running it for the people who live there and use it.

At the party, Executive Director Noni Sessions talked about our being rainbow warriors on the prophetic path, the heart path, and I immediately felt the presence of Hairston’s Cinnamon Jones and the collective of people growing an example of what I’ve taken to calling “islands of coherence” after a quote I saw from Ilya Prigogine: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

Quoting Prigogine – who won the Nobel in chemistry but whose work incorporated physics and, obviously, complexity and chaos theory – is appropriate in relation to a work built on hoodoo and physics.

And while Cinnamon Jones is at the heart of this book, it is a story about community holding the world and the truth together. At the beginning of Book II, Hairston has a quote from the biologist and Gaia theorist Lynn Margulis: “Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.” This story is not about Cinnamon alone, not about one person against the machine.

Make no mistake: this story is set in a messy future, one of gated cities for the wealthy, shit jobs working there for others, and nothing for a lot of refugees from the water wars. If there’s any government left anywhere, it’s not helping anyone.

There’s tech in here along with magic, and a thin line between the two. But the part that feeds my heart is its community, a messy collaboration that makes everything from pizza to theatrical performances and has a place for almost everyone. Of all the books I read this year, this is the one that gives me hope along with the sheer joy of reading it.

I read many other good books this year as well as some very fine newsletters and essays. It seems to me I’m always either reading or looking for something to read. I am always hungry for ideas, particularly in these chaotic times. There are many fine writers out there who produce words that make me think.

At a different time, I might have written about some of those other books or the newsletters, but in these fraught days the echoes of past, present, and future compelled me to focus on the books that made those points most powerfully for me.

The truth about our past and present is vital, but hope and the possibility of even joy in our future is what keeps me going. To quote the song Cinnamon writes for the festival at the heart of Archangels of Funk, “I’ma be my own sun and rise.”

 

Nancy Jane Moore is the author of the novels The Weave and For the Good of the Realm and the novella Changeling, all from Aqueduct. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. Lately, she’s been writing more poetry and seeing it published. She also does a daily senryu commenting on her state of mind or the state of the world called #zentao, publishing it on social media. A fifth-generation Anglo Texan who lived for many years in Washington, DC, she now lives with her sweetheart in an Oakland, California, neighborhood full of crows who all know them well. She’s working on a sequel to Realm.

 

 

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 31: Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

Always Reading in 2023

By Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

We are slowly being crowded out of our apartment by books. We buy them. We pick them up on the street and in little free libraries. We check them out of the public library. We keep trying to get rid of the ones we don’t want, but that requires us to both decide we don’t want something and then for one of us to actually take it out of the place.

Things would be worse if it wasn’t for ebooks. I’ve got three reading apps and two library apps for those. Plus magazines also take up space, especially New Scientist, which comes weekly. We keep trying to throw magazines out (or put them on the street for others), but it’s hard to be sure we’ve finished with them.

And of course, I read magazines and newspapers and newsletters online as well, not to mention various and sundry articles and blogs I stumble across. The truth is that my partner and I are always reading. It makes figuring out which books and other things to write about a challenge, because I can’t write about them all.

So instead of trying to include everything I read this year, I want to focus on two books that affected me profoundly and deeply. Two very different books.

 

The first is Menewood by Nicola Griffith. This is the sequel to Hild, which I also loved, but Menewood is so much more than a sequel. First of all, looking at it as a writer, it is simply a brilliant piece of written work. It’s 681 pages long (not counting notes and maps) and every page, every sentence, every word matters. I, who often skim through long and exciting books because I want to know what happens next, read every damn word. It took me five days and cost me sleep because I had some important things I also had to do. I could not put it down for long.

My passion for this book goes beyond the sheer beauty of the writing. While it shows Griffith’s depth of knowledge of the history of England in the seventh century (long before it was even one small country, much less an empire), it is much more than a good historical novel. Yes, of course, a lot of is made up, for so much of the history of that time is unknown. But Griffith has wedded her knowledge of the things that did happen with her speculative fiction writer’s ability to come up with what could have happened within the context of that reality. She made it up, but it fits.

And even more importantly to me, she has written a book about what true leaders do, and should do. The “kings” of English history in this time are warlords contending with each other for land and power and wealth. Each kingdom is tiny, by today’s standards, and each king has  ambition for more. But, like all too many leaders even of large countries, not to mention corporate barons of today, they want that power and wealth for its own sake, not for what they can do with it for their people.

 Hild is a woman with a lot of power, but she is different from those kings. Reading this book makes one see what a world could be like with true leadership.

This is a masterpiece of literature and Griffith’s best book yet. I have read all her novels and a good chunk of her short fiction and have been a fan of her work for a very long time, but this book crosses a threshold.

If you haven’t read Hild, read it first. Menewood transcends that very good book, but the underpinnings are important.

The second book is completely different: How Infrastructure Works, by engineering professor Deb Chachra. This deeply important book delves into the many systems that underlie our modern world – electricity, international shipping, roads, communications, plumbing – and makes it clear how essential they are.

Chachra makes several important points in this book. First of all, infrastructure systems are, by their very nature, collective. They are used by many people at once and work best when they are operated with that in mind.

Secondly, most crucial infrastructure is relatively new, having been developed within the last couple of hundred years. While roads have been around for millennia, the sheer number of highways that were built over the 20th century to accommodate the automobile boggles my mind when I think about it.

Third, infrastructure is what makes modern life modern. Without it, people must devote all their time to the basic tasks of life. If your home lacks running water, you must fetch it. If it lacks refrigeration, you can’t store food. Without a sewer system, you face challenges in dealing with human waste. Off the grid life may sound “free,” but modern systems are what gives us the time and space to do more with our lives than the basics.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, infrastructure is something we humans invented. Unlike natural systems, it is not unchangeable. Not only that, but we can learn from our errors if we look at the system carefully. For example, people assumed that widening highways would solve traffic problems, but instead, that tends to increase traffic because more people use the road. And drainage systems that dump waste into rivers or even oceans have created new problems.

Much of our current infrastructure was created around fossil fuels, but here is the part of the book that gives me the most hope: Chachra says we can build a future that provides sufficient infrastructure to give all of us the systems we need to make life reasonable and comfortable from renewable energy sources. This will require redoing current infrastructure, which also will give us the opportunity to make different decisions about what we need. (Maybe we don’t need all those cars and roads.)

And once we do that, the energy to run our world will cost almost nothing, especially by comparison to fossil fuels. There are some technological challenges still, but the bigger ones are societal and political.

I’ve tried to summarize why I find this book so constructive, but I still feel like I’m not doing it justice. The writing is delightful, clear to a lay person like myself without being condescending. Chachra manages the trick of being honest about the challenges we face while still being optimistic about what we can do. The information is vital to everyone from the writer who wants to creature a non-dystopic future to the activist dealing with climate change to any person frustrated with badly run utilities and overcrowded highways.

I want everyone to read this book!

I’m so far behind on seeing movies that it’s almost silly for me to comment on them. But I do want to mention one movie that I think most people missed: the 2019 slasher film Black Christmas. (This is a remake of two earlier movies with the same name, so the date of release is important.)

 I actually saw this movie at the end of 2019, but I watched it again this year because I wanted to discuss it in an academic paper for WisCon. It’s one of the most feminist movies I’ve ever seen, which is not something you expect from a slasher film.

This particular movie roots the violence necessary to the genre in misogyny and most of the murder victims are women. In one healthy improvement to the genre, the camera does not dwell on dead female bodies.

But more than that, the women students fight back even though they are not superheroes or trained fighters, and they fight back collectively. This movie does not show women as powerless and it shows the importance of doing things together.

I found it much more inspiring than the various movies about women superheroes. Give me an ordinary hero any day.

I will confess that I found the movie a little harder to watch the second time because I knew that characters I was invested in were going to die. I don’t usually watch slasher movies or recommend them. But this one did inspire me and I’d like to see it get more of a following.

One other thing I did this year was become obsessed about so-called artificial intelligence as represented by the large language model (LLM) chatbots that were released into the wild with great hype and even greater flaws. There are many ways of looking at those programs; I know some writers very angry because their work was used in developing the LLMs and others who have lost the kind of steady freelance jobs that paid their bills because some fool thought they could be replaced with a program.

But while those things are a concern, I find them just one part of a much larger set of issues. Not, I hasten to add, the laughable idea that these LLMs will become true artificial general intelligence and either bring about some kind of salvation or destroy the word; contrary to the tech bro vision, neither the Terminator nor the Matrix movies are documentaries.

Unfortunately, much of the popular media coverage of these LLMs has been uncritical reports based on the hype laid out by Open AI and the other companies, leaving out the very real criticisms leveled by those who are generally called ethicists – people who understand what this tech is doing and who see a number of problems that aren’t even being considered, starting with the fact that most LLMs make some serious errors that can be dangerous if they are used for such things as facial recognition systems, just to pick one.

There is a lot of good material out there. I want to point to two good starting places for examining the deeper issues. One is the academic paper “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major. It was this paper that got Gebru and Mitchell fired from Google.

 The other is an article by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker: “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPG of the Web,” in which he describes the chatbots as “lossy text-compression algorithms.”

Both these pieces undercut the popular narrative and make clear that we’re a long way from real AI. They also make it clear that we need to stop falling for tech bro hype and start questioning and regulating the products that come out of that world. The copyright lawsuits currently pending may help, but the problems created by LLMs are much broader than the immediate issues of writers and publishers.

As I was about to send this piece off to Aqueduct, I read the latest newsletter from Dave Karpf, a professor who studies the internet and politics. He suggests two things that may happen with LLMs that will change the pop narrative and perhaps even open up the much more important ethical discussion.

One is that copyright law may be strong enough to override what they’re doing, similar to what happened with Napster some twenty years ago. But his second point, that we might figure out that these stronger LLMs are useful for a lot of things such tech has been used for in the past, rather than the next step to artificial general intelligence. That is, it’s not the birth of true AI, but simply a better computing tool for certain kinds of analytical and tech work.

That gave me something cheerful to think about as I approached the New Year.

 

Nancy Jane Moore is the author of the fantasy novel For the Good of the Realm, the science fiction novel The Weave, and the novella Changeling,  all from Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines and in a collection from PS Publishing. She holds a fourth degree black belt in Aikido. In other lifetimes she organized co-ops, practiced law, and worked as a legal editor. A native Anglo Texan, she lived in Washington, DC, for many years and now lives with her sweetheart in Oakland, California. Over the last few years, she has developed good relationships with her neighborhood crows. She is currently working on a sequel to For the Good of the Realm. Website (currently in progress): nancyjanemoore.com.